The First Crewed Spacecraft Vostok and Voskhod: The Time of Firsts

The first man in space. The first group flight into orbit. The first woman-cosmonaut. The first spacewalk. All these breakthroughs of the USSR were made possible thanks to the manned spacecraft “Vostok” and “Voskhod.” Today we no longer fully realize what a scientific feat those first orbital flights were—and what enormous risk they involved: tenfold g-forces and temperatures up to 3500°, insufficiently studied effects of weightlessness and cosmic radiation. The trajectory for a ballistic descent, angles of attack, and the thermal regime began being calculated long before on manual electromechanical calculators, and of the seven test launches preceding Yuri Gagarin’s triumph, only three were successful. No wonder that many years later Boris Chertok admitted that “today I would never sign a guarantee of safety” for the launch of the first cosmonaut, and that only after “gaining huge experience” did he understand how strongly we then risked… In this new book by a leading historian of astronautics, you’ll find comprehensive information about the first manned spacecraft of the USSR and the training of the first cosmonauts.